Wajdi Mallat

Wajdi Mallat (Arabic: وجدي ملاّط‎‎) (November 22, 1919 – April 17, 2010) was a Lebanese jurist, statesman and author. He was the first president of the Constitutional Council (Arabic المجلس الدستوري) of Lebanon, from 1994 to 1997. He resigned from the Council over the handling of the parliamentary elections of 1996.

Born on November 22, 1919, Wajdi Mallat was the scion of a family of poets from the city of Baabda, the capital of Ottoman Mount Lebanon. His uncle Tamer (1856–1914), a judge during the Ottoman era, was a well-known poet who stood publicly against the arbitrariness and corruption of Wasa Basha (Arabic واصا باشا), the plenipotentiary governor of Mount Lebanon. His mother, Marie Checrallah, hailed from a family of physicians educated in Constantinople. His father, Shibli (1875–1961), was celebrated as the "Poet of the Cedars" (Arabic شاعر الأرز) in Cairo and Alexandria, Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo and Haifa, and entertained close friendships across the region, from then Emir Abdallah of Transjordan (later King Abdullah I of Jordan) to the first president of independent Lebanon, Bechara El-Khoury.

Wajdi Mallat was educated at the Jesuit college of Beirut, then studied for an advanced degree in Latin while earning a Masters in law from Saint Joseph University, where his classmates included many of the subsequent intellectual and political leaders of Lebanon. Among his professors was . Wajdi Mallat was attached early on to the unique interwar experiment of liberalism in the Levant, especially Egypt, which he lived first hand from the close friendship between his father and the leader of the Egyptian national movement, Saad Zaghloul. As the young representative of the Lebanese delegation to UNESCO, which held an early Congress in Beirut in 1948, he made friends with such luminaries as Taha Hussein and Louis Massignon on his trip to Paris in preparation of the meeting.

Following a legal apprenticeship with prominent Lebanese lawyers Edmond Gaspard and Yusuf al-Sawda, he established Mallat law offices in 1949. As a lawyer, he defended celebrated cases in Lebanese modern advocacy, winning landmark judicial victories on behalf of the Vatican and the Beirut Maronite Church. In 1972, he was elected president of the Beirut bar, and founded the first Arab Organization for Human Rights in 1974, together with prominent Arab lawyers like Abderrahmane Youssoufi (Arabic عبد الرحمن اليوسفي), a prisoner of conscience and later prime minister of Morocco.

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